The Pakistani teenager was targeted for championing girls’ education, a campaign that gained international recognition when she began blogging about her education for the BBC, anonymously at first. After she acknowledged she’d written the blog, Malala was attacked in her hometown of Mingora, where one would-be assassin put a bullet in her head. The authorities made arrests, but didn’t find the attack’s planner. The Taliban complained later that the media showed bias while covering its attempted murder of a child: “this filthy, godless media has taken huge advantage of this situation, and journalists have started passing judgment on us,” a Taliban spokesperson said in October.
Malala is recovering in England. She insists “that she be photographed with a book in hand and her headscarf carefully draped to hide any signs of damage — both as a nod to tradition and so that supporters would know that her priorities had not changed,” Baker writes.